I played Fable 2 today. I'm not going to play Fable 2 again.
Besides the fact that it's an incredibly beautiful game, I just don't see much point. While I haven't played FFXIII, and I know that its level design is incredibly linear, how is that any different from Fable 2, which might as well be on-rails? Basically, the game gives the player this "golden trail" to follow which leads him/her towards the next objective. So you follow it to your next objective… and just keep doing that, ad infinitum. Sure, you can go off the beaten trail for some treasure, but there hasn't been nearly enough incentive to do so so far.
Objective markers are simply one of several elements of a game's Heads-up Display, something that most games have. I think at this point, the less HUD elements we have in games, the better. There's got to be a way to present pertinent information to the player without resorting to having text floating above a character's head, or having health bars up in the top corner of a screen. These may be conceptual parts of videogaming by this point, but games such as Dead Space have shown how to do HUDs right – by making them a diagetic part of the gaming world. It might be considered by some to just be "cute" game design, but when the HUD elements get to be so overbearing, as in Fable 2, to actively dissuade exploration and figuring things out on your own, it's too much. Developers – hear my cry. GET RID OF HUDs NOW.
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Hah yeah I should have warned you, Fable 2 is really horrible. I feel bad for people who think it's actually a good game, because they must never have actually played anything that qualifies as good.
And that's officially the most snobbish thing I've said all day lol
It's like Peter Molyneux thought that including all of these elements like a "relationship system" or what have you, and then boiling those elements down to their shallowest essence would be enough to blow people's minds. Well, I'm sorry, but I don't know of any relationships where I gave someone a thumbs up, then did a little jig, then gave them a present, and they fell in love with me.
But goddamn if the Fable games wouldn't be good if they were exactly like how Molyneux said they would be!
[…] I was no big fan of Fable 2, but there's no one better than Peter Molyneux at building hype for his games. I was reasonably […]